A client of mine has reported a problem with the playback of a .mp4 video file when it runs on his Sony Experia F3111 device - apparently the screen is heavily pixelated and mostly green, although the content of the video can be seen (it's not a blank, green screen!).
The clip in question is displayed as a sort of 'Splash Screen' and when it completes the 'Home' activity is displayed.
Not having this model of device to hand I have tested it on a few others and have noticed some varying behaviour;
- A Samsung Galaxy S7 (Marshmallow) will display the first second or so with a Red tint before displaying the video correctly (see attachment below)
- A Nexus 7 (Marshmallow) refused to play the clip at all (noticed during initial development and handled but not ideal)
- My Pixel 2 XL (Pie), a HTC One M8 (Marshmallow) also refused to play the clip
- A Samsung A3 (Marshmallow), Galaxy S4 (Lollipop) and a HTC Desire 320 (KitKat) play the clip without any problems
The code uses a full screen VideoView with no special configuration, i.e. I just set the path to the clip and start it. I have a handler in place to handle when the clip finishes and this just loads the Home activity.
I've read that Hardware Acceleration could be to blame but setting the 'Hardware Accelerated' flag to false in the 'Activity' attribute but this had no effect (good or bad!)
I'm not averse to swapping out the standard VideoView component but the client does not have masses of time available in their budget to resolve the issue on top of some other updates they have requested.